Name: Jess Kallen
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, side person, educator
Nationality: American
Current release: Jess Kallen's Exotherm LP is out June 21st 2023 via New Professor.

If you enjoyed this Jess Kallen interview and would like to stay up to date with their music, visit Jess's official homepage. They're also on Instagram, and tiktok.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you’re listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I definitely have synesthetic listening experiences. I don’t have perfect pitch, but in my mind each key has a particular blend of colors and textures (my favorites are Db major and B major).

I usually listen to music best while in motion (so naturally, with eyes open). That’s usually on long walks and bike rides through my neighborhood, Elysian Heights.

What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

I expressed interest in guitar when I was only five or so, and it’s always been a channel for my hyper-fixation tendencies. Memories of my first years playing are of joyful (albeit manic) exploration, sitting criss-crossed on my parents’ futon and looping an idea for hours (which no doubt drove everyone around me nuts).

At 18, I went to music school to study guitar, and today my musicianship feels robust, bolstered by all the theory and skills I learned there. Still, I often yearn for the “kindergarten feeling” of the early days, of being a baby on my instrument, hypnotized by the mystery it presented.

In these moments, I’ve found that alternate tunings can scratch the itch. By disrupting my literacy on the fretboard, I can once more access that sense of wonder and possibility on the guitar.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

By the time I entered teenage years, my dad had played me some Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. I was drawn to the sounds of pre-war acoustic jazz, and I became obsessed with Django, both musically and in a folk-hero sense.



A Romani-Belgian guitar savant, his life was an epic tragedy-turned-redemption arc. A catastrophic caravan fire destroyed the use of his third and fourth fingers when he was only a teenager. He eventually retaught himself guitar entirely, and developed a style of playing that exclusively used his index and middle fingers. There’s a restlessness and determined spunk to Django’s playing that always gets me; I sense that maybe he never felt quite at home in this world.

Listening to his music as I was entering my own moody adolescence years, I think I resonated with this perceived ennui, and the desire to yank myself out of it. And like Django, with flair.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

I don’t have very many instruments, just a few that I really treasure.

The first guitar I ever played was a quarter-sized classical guitar, so nylon strings hold a special place in me still. Maybe that’s why I often start writing my songs on this parlor-size Brazilian nylon string guitar I’ve acquired. It’s from the ’50’s, battered and broken-in like a beloved pair of sneakers.

It feels like home, and provides a very comfy, intimate place to start crafting a song.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

So much to say here, so a list will have to suffice: playfulness, truth, mischief, community, connection, subversion, empowerment, queer joy, freedom.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What’s your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

At risk of revealing my own blind spots, I don’t think I really started listening to lyrics until I was 20 or so. I just love melody and harmony, I could live on that much alone! And so sonic landscape still tends to be the first thing I notice when listening to music, and my own songs usually begin from that place as well.

I’ll establish the underlying emotions of the music first by fleshing out a chord progression, a basic arrangement, and then I let lyrics find a home. The latter part tends to be the most tedious: I find that word-smithing brings out a brutal masochist in me. I’m kind of manic until I settle on a word choice that satisfies both me and the needs of the song.

Sometimes I simply can’t find the right words, and then the music retires to a backlog of instrumental songs (which I’m admittedly excited to release in some form down the line).

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you’ve had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

It’s stereotypical, but the sounds of trains really tug at something inside of me: maybe from growing up taking the BART around the SF Bay Area. I love a train’s throaty horns, the chugging wheels, the screeching brakes. I’m also particularly endeared to quail calls (“chi-ca-go”), another effect of my California upbringing.

I’ve spent many summers of my life at a music camp in the Coastal Redwoods of West Sonoma County; I hold the sounds of this place with such tender nostalgia, and I often imagine the groans of the giant trees, creaking in the evening wind. It all feels like music to me; and letting the noises be the soundtrack to my days makes everything more bearable, not to mention beautiful.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

Oh hell yes. I think a perfect (the perfect?!) song that embraces musical extremes is “Hammond Song” by The Roches. I’ve never heard a vocal performance quite like the one in this song.



Maggie, Terre and Suzzy Roche bring immense power and synergy to their harmonies in a way that maybe only sisters can. Their cutting vocals sit atop a subdued hammond pedal-tone and warm acoustic guitar strums. And then, there’s this kind of random, frothy distorted guitar solo by Robert Fripp in the middle of the tune. I simply love the surprises this song offers. Just thinking about it puts a lump in my throat.

In a more modern study of extreme tonal shifts, I think of “Night Shift” by Lucy Dacus, a dynamic gem from a songwriter I adore.



And also “Airport” by my friend and collaborator Rosie Tucker, who’s a genius when it comes to marrying bombastic truths with songbird clarity.

[Read our Rosie Tucker interview]



From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriad ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

This is a beautiful aspect of songwriting—every song has a different “in”, and I feel like my job is that of an excavator searching for the mouth of a tunnel. I don’t have much control over the end result; that’s all dictated by whatever the song wants, not me. Sometimes, it favors the straightforward.

In “Ink”, a verse leads to a refrain, something familiar to nudge the listener along. Other times the music meanders in a direction that defies my expectations.



Like in “Mile Eleven”—there is no chorus, just a path that winds and winds, spiraling until the song ends in bitter resolve.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that’s particularly dear to you, please?

“Oolong”, the last song on the record, is a very dear one to me.

It started with some stripped-down chord voicings that held a hidden melody inside of them — it’s the kind of guitar part I can really believe in and obsess over, which is pretty essential for me to stick with any given idea. I was looping it endlessly until the straightforward words fell out, beginning with the opening line: “Bitter spooning, we were angry in the dark”. How I love the magic of the process!

Freaky, divine shit! I’m astonished that this phrase full of heartache found a home in a song about openings: making room in myself for both conflict and forgiveness, and holding it all with humility.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you’re making music?

I think by another guitarist’s standards I’m a failure of a gear head, in the sense that I don’t like being responsible for enormous pedalboards or having my entire tone exist inside a series of boxes instead of in my hands. But, I do have certain pieces of gear that help me experiment outside of my comfy guitar zone. My Tonal Recall pedal by Chase Bliss is endless, spacy fun. I used it all over my record, and on friends’ projects too.



My favorite exploratory sounds come from approaching the guitar in a subversive, experimental way. Sometimes I weave a rubber band across my strings like a pseudo-rubber bridge, or I’ll strum with a piece of aluminum foil, or one of those thick erasers you use in school.

The goal is always freedom. This past year I saw Fred Frith play a live show, which has since helped me better commit to this. He held his guitar in his lap and prepared it with binder clips, dragged metal chains across the strings, hit them with rulers. I believe that kind of radical mischief is key to compelling art.



How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I don’t believe any noise exists in a vacuum—whether I’m performing, recording, teaching, or messily practicing by myself, it all informs who I am and how I connect with others around me.

I feel such relief in this, that it’s all cyclical and intersectional—I make music to make community, to make more music, to make more community … that’s all the permission I need to keep doing the thing!

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn’t or wouldn’t in more & “mundane” tasks?

I think of music as a delicious, gooey plasma that takes whatever shape you allow it.

Speaking for myself, and contrary to romanticized expectations around what defines “art”, sometimes making music is utterly—unremarkable. Like brushing my teeth: good hygiene, and essential maintenance for my body and spirit. Other days, it’s tectonic, grandiose and divine. A yawp, a wish. A declaration— “I’M HERE!!!”

Music is all of this and everything in between, and therein lies a conduit for understanding the seemingly disparate parts of our lives—from the mundane to the otherworldly—as connected.

Every time I listen to “Albedo 0.39” by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can’t explain?

“Beachball” by Dan Reeder.



I don’t even wanna say too much about this song. It’s just everything I want music to be—astonishing, succinct, mysteriously and magically true.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

In the anti-capitalist future of music-making I believe in, there’s room for everyone.

Organized labor runs the show (the proverbial and literal music show), leading the fight for more just creative spaces and a better society at large. Queer and BIPOC artists headline every bill. Shows are radically subversive, interdisciplinary, genre-queer. A dance collective, student jazz combo, alt-rock elder, and mariachi ensemble can share the same bill on the same night.

There is real, tangible infrastructure for artists to be independent, remain independent, and not worry about making rent. Touring is sustainable for the body and spirit. No gate-keeping promoters. Predatory streaming models are irrelevant. Artists and listeners are taken care of, honored, connected.